


Violence Fetish

by squishywitch (Anshin)



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Backstory, Canon-Typical Violence, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Inception Reverse Big Bang Challenge, M/M, Minor Character Death, Psychopaths In Love, questionable relationship ethics, references to alcoholism and rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-20
Updated: 2014-11-20
Packaged: 2018-02-26 08:57:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2645954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anshin/pseuds/squishywitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Arthur is Death, then Eames is the Devil, and they will dance until they’re both six feet under.</p><p>written for Inception Reverse-Bang 2014; art by marourin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Violence Fetish

**Author's Note:**

> so this was written for the amazing spectacular artwork by marourin, in which Arthur is an assassin and Eames is a painter. several iterations of a plot later, this happened, because i realised that psychopaths in love was the natural course to take with it. it's, uh, a bit odd, a bit rough, and i might revisit it later, but for now, i'm happy with the result. beta read by my lovely partner, [tyrotheterrible](http://archiveofourown.org/users/tyrotheterrible).
> 
> for the art: http://marourin.livejournal.com/18792.html

Arthur says, “Don’t go anywhere.”

Arthur always says that.

And one day, Eames thinks, one day, maybe it won’t sound like such a temptation, like Arthur’s just saying it to issue a challenge.

But every time Arthur says it, he leaves Eames tied up and laughing through a gag in the basement, so really, what is Eames supposed to think?  If there’s another interpretation, Eames would love to hear it.

Maybe eventually he’ll tell Arthur how he gets out.

For the time being...well.

“Really, darling, you _must_ start leaving a pair of safety shears in reach.  It’s only responsible.”

For the time being, he loves the way Arthur jumps and glares when Eames saunters up and makes himself at home alongside Arthur, regardless of what he’s doing.  Currently, Arthur’s sitting a corner booth at Nolo Contendre and actually looking the part, which stuns Eames, because this is the sort of place that Arthur usually curls his lip at and grumbles about politicians and sycophants and new money who think they’re old money and old money who think they’re still relevant.

But Arthur is none of the above, and Eames thinks the chip on Arthur’s shoulder is absolutely charming.

“Eames,” Arthur grits out under his breath.  “Get the fuck out of here.”

“I’m serious,” Eames says, sliding into the booth next to him and making a show of rubbing the marks on his wrists.  (Marks hardly caused by Arthur’s careful knotwork—no, marks caused by Eames’s struggle to get loose from said knotwork, probably not strictly unavoidable, but his argument would have less impact without them.)  “You could get caught in traffic, leave me there for hours with no escape.  I might pass out, cut off circulation.  I could lose a hand, you know.”

“Funny how you don’t seem to have any trouble escaping as it is.”  Arthur takes a sip from his glass, ice clinking; Eames can’t tell if it’s water or gin and tonic.  “I’m serious too.  I’m working and you’re not dressed appropriately anyway.  Get out of here.”

“Oh, darling,” Eames says, propping an elbow on the table and his chin on his wrist, grinning at Arthur even though Arthur’s busy scanning the room.  “It’s almost like you missed me.”

“Hard to miss you if you never go away.”

“You’re the one tying me up in your basement.  Funny way to try and be rid of me.”

“For two hours while I’m working?  Yeah, and here I thought it might work.”

Eames leans towards Arthur to try and follow his line of sight.  “Hm.  Fellow at the bar?  The one in the burgundy shirt?  Or the one he’s talking to?”

Arthur’s eyes slide closed like he’s fending off a headache.  “Eames, I swear to god...”

“Ooh, threats.  I love threats.  I especially love when you actually follow through.  Is this going to be one of those times?  Please don’t disappoint me, love.”

Arthur grabs Eames’s hand under the table and bends the little finger back until Eames starts to fold towards the pain, albeit with an expression unreactive.

“Easy, Arthur, christ—that’s the bad one—” Eames hisses.

“I know,” Arthur replies.  “Are you gonna leave or do I have to remove you?”

“And cause a fuss?” Eames says.  Arthur releases his finger and Eames balls his fist up against his stomach while the throb fades.  “You wouldn’t.  But out of respect, I’ll see myself out.”  He slides out of the booth and tucks his hands in his pockets.  “Shall I tie myself back up for you?”

“You kidding?  Then I really would have to worry about you losing a hand.”

Eames smiles and vacates the restaurant.  He figures the least he can do is wait in the bedroom with the gag and handcuffs on.  Safe enough, but Arthur will still reprimand him for it.  And really, that’s what makes it all worth it in the end.

 

***

 

Three hours later, the metal of the cuffs is biting into Eames’s wrists and the small of his back, and Arthur’s hands are around his throat.

“Harder,” Eames gasps, each time Arthur’s grip loosens.

“Do you actively want me to kill you?” Arthur snarls, clamping down on the artery and vein until his hands start to cramp.

Through the haze of lightheadedness, Eames grins, dreamy and distant.  When Arthur lets go, a raspy laugh breaks from him.  “Someday, darling,” Eames replies.  “ _Harder._ ”

Eames is never in it for the sex, but he knows as soon as he blacks out that Arthur will either go jack off in the bathroom (if he’s angry and frustrated) or on Eames (if he’s feeling spiteful).  And that notion is enough to amplify the dizziness, enough to push the oxygen deprivation high into pure euphoria, enough to push him over the edge of mere altered state and into true subspace.  His hands go lax, his shoulders drop, his eyes flutter, and all tension of needing to breathe gives way to subliminal bliss.  

First grey, then white, then black.

 

***

 

If Arthur is Death, then Eames is the Devil, and they will dance until they’re both six feet under.

 

***

 

For Eames, it began in 1992. 

But at the age of 15, Eames is not yet Eames, and he won’t be for another seven years.  He’s still Liam, he’s still a cocky teenager who hasn’t quite hit his growth spurt, who thinks he’s invincible, who lets his surroundings shape the edges of his accent, and who has a piercing in his eyebrow and his first tattoo on his shoulder: _trust your heart / if the seas catch fire_ , hopelessly trite and cliche in a typewriter-serif font, but true to a heartbroken heart.  He’s fifteen, and it still matters.

Today all his _th_ sounds are slipping out as a _v_ or an _f_ , and no matter how he tries to hide it his lisp slips through, and there’s something sideways to the cant of his words and the lilt of his tone.  He feels thin-strung, a hairline fracture on a thawing lake, but if he’s walking the edge of a blade, it’s one made more dangerous by the knicks and the warp of use, sharpened too many times and unbalanced in the hand.

He smokes because he can (and has since he was thirteen, even if he couldn’t at all pass for sixteen then and still barely passes for his actual age now) and has never had an interest in drinking.  He hangs around pubs because he finds the clientele interesting, their weaving conversations about football and politics and workman’s wages and women.  He collects them in his head, their speech patterns and movements, all the little idiosyncrasies, the way they walk, how they hold a glass or someone’s hand.  He watches their facial expressions and logs away every dimple and wrinkle, every fire-crackle laugh of an old man and every bulletproof smile of businessmen after hours.  These are things he practices, mimics in his room while inventing new people out of the patchwork of others.

Maybe he dreams of being an actor.  The truth is, he already is.

Everything he does is manufactured with such a professional deftness as to seem completely natural.  He’s never the same person twice, when he can help it.  He tries on personas like girls try on dresses.  Even at home, he’s always a construct, always has been.

Maybe his mother knew.  Maybe his sister knows.  Their new family has never known him for anything else than what he pretends to be, so they’ll never suspect.  But sometimes still, his sister looks at him like the mask is just a little bit crooked, like maybe she can see the oil-slick gleam of the monster underneath, the one who cuts himself open to watch himself bleed, who leaves photos and mirrors overturned in his wake, who sits quiet for hours in his bedroom doing nothing but thinking and then vanishes for half the night without a word, only to come back later bruised and soaked to the bone and laughing in a way that echoes the patter of icy rain on the roof.  And Nell, having always been the one to protect him since they were children, having loved him so much and having failed so spectacularly that Liam couldn’t help but love her for it more, will hush him and hold him down in the floor of the bathroom and make him stay still while she puts iodine on his wounds and presses a hand over his mouth and hisses at him to never say a word of this you know they’ll kick you out  while she tends his wounds because she’s old enough to have moved out but keeps coming back, and Liam knows she’ll never really leave him.  She can’t pull away.

The last drag of the cigarette pulls back like a lit fuse and he holds his breath for a moment—one, two, three, four, five—and crushes it out in the amber glass ashtray on the table.  The silence holds around him.  Maybe this one’s a dud.  He pulls out another and lights it, and maybe this time, he’ll go off.

There’s a haze of gold hanging heavy overhead, curling around the shoulders of the thinning trickle of people in the pub, glittering off of the condensation on pints and the sweat on foreheads of anyone seeking shelter from the summer heat.  The lights overhead are stained with years of nicotine and littered with the shadows of transfixed insects.  Everything here is dull tonight—the people, the conversation, the expressions, the lighting itself.  Nothing he hasn’t heard or seen a thousand times before.  But it’s not worth finding somewhere else.  He’s not here as a collector tonight, just as a teenager who’s tired of home and who would rather take his chances with a slow tar-choked death than a quick one with the undercurrent of the Thames.

There’s a difference in the din here and the racket at home, even if the former is somewhat louder than the latter.  At least here, none of the noise is directed at him.  He can't tune it out but he neither has to pay attention.  It's not that he minds his sisters.  It's just that they make it impossible to be alone, even locked in his room, even curled up in the floor of his closet, wide-eyed staring at what isn't there, even with headphones on to drown it all out and a knife in hand with the blade not yet wet.  Every footstep, laugh, shriek, wail, every accusation and crying spell, all to speak nothing of the small fists pounding on his door and begging him, "Uncle Liam, come play," all of it rattles through his skull and pushes him precariously between rage and panic while he entertains notions of burlap sacks full of unwanted, squirming kittens and the short drop from the Hammersmith Bridge.  

Here, it's only background, people he can scare away with marble features and deft fingers twirling objects full of violent potential, people inconsequential, people who could perhaps serve as a key for the lock on his aggression, free from regret or repercussion.  Or people who could be nothing at all, empty shadows of human beings who have no idea that there's anything else they could be.

It's only background.  Until it's not.

"William?"

His mind goes buzzing blank, his outline blurring as if shaken by the sound waves.  Breathing becomes impossible.  His heart thuds and his eyes burn and he feels as if the world would crumble if he only let it, strung together by the sinews of his body, stretching, tearing—

He closes his eyes, inhales through his nose, the smell of sweat and smoke and stale ale sickening and grounding.

"Sorry, mate.  Got the wrong guy."

“Oh, come on,” the man says, sounding far, far too jovial for Liam’s current mental state.  “Don’t you try to get one over on me, I know my own son.”

“No,” Liam replies.  Lightheaded.  Everything’s sort of...drifting upwards, or maybe he is, he can’t tell.  Gravity isn’t right, is all.  “Really.  You’ve got the wrong guy.  I haven’t got a father.”

The silence that follows is thick as oil, and just as toxic.

Liam opens his eyes to be met with another pair, through the haze and yellowed by the sullied light, that are a mirror-match of his own, though aged and shadowed.  The man’s bone structure shows under his sunken features much more pronouncedly than does Liam’s under the blush of youth and a layer of baby fat he still hasn’t managed to shake (no matter how many meals he’s skipped and miles he’s run).  But it’s the same in the height of the cheekbones, the slope of the nose, the angle of the jaw.  The mouth is thinner, the hair is darker, the complexion ruddier and bearing no freckles, all traits avoided in the genes from Liam’s mother.  He and his sister were cherubic as children, doll-like in the young bloom of pubescence, and she has grown into a woman of classic loveliness and a dancer’s grace, he blessed with a genderless beauty built of the contrast in his petal-soft lips and long lashes and square jaw and sharp brow, a teenager lacking all of the awkwardness of teenagerdom.  But they gained from their mother a predisposition towards physical illness, and from their father a predisposition towards mental illness, because even in perfect packages, poisoned minds can rest.

Liam’s long since built an immunity.  He wonders if the man before him could tolerate it as well.

The stricken look on his face, as if backhanded by Liam’s assertion, gives him his answer.

“William, whatever grudge you’ve got against me for leaving, let it rest.  It’s been years.  I don’t understand why you wouldn’t speak to me at your mother’s funeral, and I thought maybe if I gave you some space for a little while—”

“Like you did before?” Liam asks.  “What, eight years of it wasn’t sufficient?  No, no, actually, if you’ve convinced yourself that’s why I’ve got a grudge, you’re a bigger cunt than I thought.”

The man glances about in the nothing, as if casting for an answer, brow vaguely furrowed.

“Really?” Liam says, on the razor-edge of a bitter laugh.  “You forgot what you did to me and Nell?  Or maybe you thought we’d forget, and it’s a lie of omission.  Oh no.  No.  I remember.”  Surely he’s floating now.  Surely he’s outside of himself, looking in on the conversation as if watching a film.  He can hear the words, but they’re not his own, however familiar the voice.  The smell of cigarettes and alcohol and the uncomfortable warmth of the pub are far away, clinging to someone else’s senses.  “Barely.  But I remember.”

A sharp, half-horrified glance is the only reply Liam receives.

It’s strange, watching himself at a distance, watching reactions to things he couldn’t bring himself to say, but that are nonetheless being said.

“I’m sorry, William,” the man has the audacity to say.

Liam doesn’t know whether he’s laughing in astonishment or rage, but it’s not really him, and he can’t feel any of it anyway, only witness.  But he’s laughing, and the man turns to walk away.

Liam follows.  Whatever has possessed him follows.  At a distance.  Observing.

He tosses the cigarette to the sidewalk and snuffs it out under his heel.  What happens next, he feels.

The cold hilt of the knife, taken from his father’s belt with a deft and practiced hand.  The faint resistance of flesh giving way under a sharpened blade.  The thick heat of blood pouring over his hand.  And, awakened in him, the need to feel it again.

Perhaps under other circumstances, the need would have been absent.  Perhaps if the bite of the damp night air were present against his skin, if the taste of nicotine were still lingering on his tongue, if the buzz in his head were anything but numbing, it would have been different.  But to feel anything at all, to bring himself back down from the ether, to be back in his own skin and acting and experiencing and feeling, god, above all, feeling—

He pulls the blade back with a squelching sound, and meets bright eyes gone cloudy with confusion, fear, pain.  Liam has control again.  He sinks the blade in once more.

And again.

And again.

And again.

Reality gives way to a different sort of altered state, euphoria as if sparked by feeding an addiction.  He thinks maybe he wouldn’t have so many scars if only he’d known sooner that drawing someone else’s blood could be so much more satisfying than drawing his own.  And here in the dark, at age fifteen, he’s discovered it.  And he can’t get enough.

Eventually he comes down.  Eventually the high wears off, the red fades and reality returns, and he’s splattered in blood and standing beside a man not yet dead.  Not yet.

 _Oh_ , he thinks. _This looks bad.  This—looks like murder._

Without hesitation, he turns the blade on himself, stabs himself once— twice— three times, quickly and with careful aim.  Whatever numbness remained is gone now, and it’s a welcome distraction to feel the pain.  So he sinks down to the sidewalk and lets himself feel it while he composes his mask.

By the time the police come, he’s a snotty, red-eyed, bleeding mess, sobbing and stammering about how he was threatened, he was attacked, he doesn’t know what came over him or what happened but he’s so scared and _jesus christ_ , did he really do this?—   is this really his fault?— oh god, he just doesn’t know what happened—

At the station, they call his sister.  His sister sees through him but vouches for his instability.  He might’ve gotten away with a self-defence charge if he hadn’t gotten carried away, but as it stands, he’ll likely be charged with manslaughter.  He’s still a minor.  He’ll be fine, in the long run.

A trip to the hospital sees him stitched up, and then his sister takes him home.  Once he’s safely in the house, upstairs, away from sleeping ears, he can’t stop laughing.

“Liam, you can’t do this again!  Do you understand how serious this is?  You could’ve—you could’ve gotten yourself killed!”  Nell grabs him by the shoulders and shoves him against the hallway wall.  “ _You killed someone, Liam, do you understand that?”_

“Ellen,” Liam says, catching his breath, though the grin remains.  “I thought you’d be happy with me.  He’s gone.  He won’t hurt anyone anymore.”

“And what about you?”  Nell says.  “Now I’ve got to worry about who you’ll hurt.”

“Not you,” Liam replies.  “Never you.”

Nell bites her tongue, and Liam knows that’s all that really matters in the end.

But he’s got his first taste of blood, of control, of that kind of power.  And it’s something that will change him viscerally and permanently inside.

 

***

 

“Don’t go anywhere,” Arthur says, and Eames smiles at the bite of jute knots down his back.

Eames is covered in paint.  The basement is covered in paint.  Bright wet splatters stain the walls and the floor, in streaks and splotches, in dabs and drips.  An incandescent light overturned in the corner flickers dangerously, relieved of its cover, now a spray of shattered glass on the concrete.  

Arthur rights the lamp and unplugs it, casting the room in odd shadows from the open door upstairs.  He quietly works his way around the room, picking up wet canvasses and propping them against the walls, collecting ones ripped through the middle or limp with broken frames and tossing them to the useless drop cloth at base of the stairs to be discarded.  The smears of paint are as abstract as ever, and Arthur won’t let his imagination take over long enough to try and figure them out.

“It’s always you,” Eames says, as if reading Arthur’s mind.  “You know?  I always start with you.  The way you make me feel.”

Arthur picks up a canvas ripped in three places that is nothing but jagged red and brown and black.

“The things you do to me.  The things you make me do.”

Arthur turns an intact canvas upright, dripping dark blue over a barely-visible flare of orange and yellow.

“I can’t help myself, really—there’s too much in me to contain.  And sometimes the paint’s not enough.” 

Arthur picks a kitchen knife up out of the floor and lays it on the pile of wrecked paintings.

“Do you know what I want to do to you?” Eames says, grinning like the Cheshire Cat.  “Do you know what I want you to do to me?”

“Later, Mr. Eames,” Arthur says, returning to him and adjusting the ropes.  He stands and takes a handkerchief from his inside pocket to wipe the paint from his fingers, then pulls on his gloves.  He runs a fingertip hard over Eames’s mouth, wiping away a smudge of mantis green from his lip.  “I have work to do.”

Arthur gathers up the canvasses in the drop cloth and takes the knife in hand.

“And Mr. Eames, we really need to discuss your propensity for wasting materials before I buy you any more.  I don’t see the point in giving you things you’re only going to destroy.”

“Darling,” Eames replies, as Arthur starts up the stairs.  “It’s in my blood.”

 

***

 

A decade or so later, in a different part of the world, there’s a boy in the desert.

“Boy” might be a misnomer.  The boy is 23 and a USMC Staff Sergeant, a scout sniper, a prodigy.  The boy grew up fast in a home with a career marine and no buffer.  The boy dropped out of high school with straight As and permission only granted on the grounds that he would immediately join the Corps, and at 17, he did.  From one day to the next can never be sure if he regrets it or not.

The boy is tired, and angry, and has been friends with violence from a very early age, keeping all of it bottled up inside of him.  The boy is very good at bottling, at sublimating the rage into apathy, into a cold, hard exterior.

Not for the sake of others.  Only for himself.  What happens to others is none of his concern.  But the loss of control, he could not tolerate.

(It happened once.  Only once.  He was 7, and had skipped a grade, and he bit a 9-year-old so hard he needed stitches.  He’ll tell you that it’s his choice to keep himself from losing control ever again, but the beating he got when his father found out kept him out of school for half a week.  If there’s fear of retribution buried within him, he’ll never admit it.)

The desert is unforgiving.

Men several years his senior don’t enjoy having a baby NCO bossing them around.  They follow his orders, but they do it to the letter, literal to a fault, working around everything he says by doing only exactly what he says.  This, Arthur can tolerate.  Arthur’s logical, a lateral thinker, all straight clean lines and hard edges.  Arthur learns to phrase his orders so there’s no holes left to slip through.  It escalates, escalates, escalates, until they’re alone, out in the field, on an expeditionary mission.

See, what Arthur can’t tolerate is the abuse of others.  Himself...no, he’ll take it.  He can take it.  Doesn’t matter.  But anyone else, he’ll intervene.  (He deserves it more.)

And Arthur finds out what some of his men have been up to.  Mostly pranks, harmless things.  Sometimes squabbles that end in minor injuries.  He wonders sometimes if this isn’t a test, if he’s been given men who can’t control themselves just to see if he can control them.  It’s a challenge he’s willing to accept.  For the most part, he looks the other way—if there’s one thing Arthur’s learned over the years, it’s how to pick his battles.

But there’s one guy.  There’s one guy who keeps getting into trouble.  Mouthing off, shirking his duties, not just actively causing problems but slacking in ways that threaten the group.  And Arthur finds out it’s deeper than that.  Arthur finds out that this guy has been a recent contributor to the epidemic of sexual assault that plagues the military.

That’s where Arthur draws the line.

He figures if he goes through the appropriate roads to solve the problem, it’ll fall dead inside of a month.

And Arthur...Arthur’s already got it in his head that he’s not gonna be here much longer anyway—the problem is systemic, the problem is bigger than the sum of its parts, the problem is the military itself and Arthur’s done with all of it, done with the outright lies and convenient circumvention of the truth, done with all of this being a replay of high school and reminding him why he quit then, done especially with the behind-the-curtains bullshit fucking him up further from the inside out.  Arthur’s got it in his head he’s going to steal a PASIV, leave as quietly as he can, and never look back.

If he gets caught, he’s done for.

Might as well make it all worth it. 

Out there on their own, in the dead of night, with ten other guys around, Arthur informs this guy that he knows what happened.  Knows the name of the officer he raped.  Knows the names of two others he almost did.

Predictably, what the guy says is, “Whatcha gonna do about it?”

Arthur sees no point in explaining.  He takes out his sidearm and puts a bullet between the guy’s eyes.

Once it’s done, he carefully wipes the splatter from his gun and his hand.  And he’s not concerned with being caught in the act.  When the others come running and find blood pooling in the sand, Arthur explains plainly and succinctly what he’s done and why.  He explains that this was an unfortunate accident.  Unforeseen enemy fire.  A rogue in the dark.  He asks if anyone would like to make his story a bit more realistic, or if they’re all willing to corroborate.  He gets no volunteers, only scared silence.

“He was an asshole anyway,” one of his men ventures softly.

“Probably was gonna get us all killed,” says another, gaining confidence.

“Wouldn’t surprise me if he’d got himself shot just for pissing too loud.”

The murmur rises to a conversation, and Arthur, satisfied, holsters his weapon and goes about reporting the incident.

He’s killed before, but only at 400 yards.  This is different.  It sparks a realisation in him, fuelled by his apathy, that killing is strangely easy.  Killing is something he could do.  Maybe he’ll just keep the PASIV, instead of selling it like he’d planned.  Maybe there’s another career waiting for him.

Two months later, he follows through, and the military never finds him.

 

***

 

There are a lot of reasons Arthur hasn’t yet shot Eames.

What confuses him sometimes is that there are a lot more reasons that he should.  If he were to write down the lists side by side, the list of reasons the world—and Arthur in particular, as an afterthought— would be better off without Eames would be at least three times as long.  Most of them would be the sort of things that would seem sound and reasonable to anybody on the planet, regardless of their stance on actually killing a person.

But with Eames bleeding out on the bathroom floor, Arthur thinks maybe he won’t have to.

Arthur frowns.  It’s disconcerting how Eames won’t stop laughing.  There’s blood dripped on the carpet from the front step all the way down the hall, until Eames collapsed and smeared blood on the wall on the way down.  A trail of slightly more than stray drips led from there to the bathroom, and now that Arthur’s stripping Eames down to get at the wound, there’s enough on the tile to fill a coffee mug.

Eames makes a grab for Arthur’s tie and tries to yank him into a kiss.  Arthur shoves him back down against the side of the tub with maybe a little too much force—but he’s freaked out, he feels like he’s losing control, he can’t stand that feeling, and Eames is—

Christ, he doesn’t know _what_ Eames is, at the moment.  Bleeding.  Profusely.  That’s all he can say for sure.

“ _Goddamnit_ , Eames— ” Arthur snaps, the blood on his hands and Eames’s wiggling making him fumble the safety shears as he tries to cut through Eames’s undershirt, more red than white now.

Laughing turns to coughing and then to this weird hiccuping sound, like Eames still feels hysterical (or euphoric or manic or _something_ , Arthur can’t even tell) but like he can’t quite get a decent breath to keep going.

Whatever Arthur’s feeling, it’s definitely not fear.  He’s not going to panic.  He doesn’t feel anything for Eames, not seriously—

 

_List the first says:_

  * _Eames is a good fuck_

  * _Eames can actually cook and I can’t live on coffee and protein bars_

  * _Eames is good at his job_

  * _I’ve tried to leave him_

  * _I’ve wanted to murder him_

  * _He’s right_

  * _I can’t get away_

  * _I need him too much_




 

Three bullet wounds mark Eames’s torso, amid the ink and old scars.  Arthur knows anatomy because his job demands it.  Even if Eames was lucky enough to avoid major organs, Arthur doesn’t think he can patch him up well enough to stop the bleeding before this gets dire.  But he doesn’t think Eames was lucky, either, so the point’s moot.

Eames coughs, hacks, doubles over and more blood splatters on the floor.  The red on his mouth draws stark contrast to the pallor in his cheeks.  His eyes are going greyer by the second.

“Don’t mistake it for love,” he says, voice thick and breath shallow.

“You’re an idiot,” Arthur says.  He can’t think of another emotion in the world that would make somebody take a bullet for someone else, let alone three.  “Don’t go anywhere.”

Eames grins dazily and sinks down a little more.  “I do believe you mean it this time.”

Arthur hesitates, only barely, before getting up and leaving the room.

 

***

 

“So if it’s not love,” Arthur says, three days later and sitting on the edge of the bed.  Eames shoves himself up so as not to spill the tea Arthur’s made.  “Then what the fuck is it?”

“Morbid fascination,” Eames replies without missing a beat.  “Like watching a car wreck in slow motion.  I like seeing you fall apart.”

“Don’t tell me you nearly got yourself killed just to see my reaction.”

Eames sips delicately at the hot tea.  “Oh, darling,” he says, smiling against the edge of the mug.  “It’s in my blood.”


End file.
